For a long time I’ve told people that if they show me an app then I’ll show them how it can be virtualized. Yes, I’m a little bigoted I guess working for VMware but I do believe there’s not one x86-based workload out there that can’t be virtualized today. To help me prove that point there are 2 great guys that got together to write a book on virtualizing Tier 1 workloads.
This new book written by Charles A. Windom and Hemant Gaidhani just got published last week and it’s available at Amazon. Hemant Gaidhani says: Looks good and worth all the efforts. Click ‘Look Inside’ at Amazon to get sneak preview.
Working with VMware vSphere 4, this book shows you how to virtualize Microsoft applications that require high CPU and high I/O and/or are critical applications for business operations—“Tier 1”applications. With authors who are not only insiders at VMware but who also have developed best practices for multi-tier applications for VMware environments, this book will guide you step-by-step in virtualizing the latest versions of Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Active Directory, Windows Server, Internet Information Server, and Remote Desktop Services. The authors cover critical topics: reasons why to virtualize the application, considerations to be made when virtualizing the application, setting up a Proof-of-Concept of the application, storage, high availability, and monitoring. Material is organized such that readers can choose which chapters to read, depending on which applications they are considering to virtualize.
Well, this isn’t exactly virtualization related – or is it. I was bopping around the web late last night and came across a rather interesting idea on how to work from home a little better. For those that don’t know I work out of my house exclusively unless I’m on a trip. I’m of the firm belief that all you need is an Internet connection and a phone and you can work from anywhere these days. For example, I’m typing this from the beach right now. (I’m sort of on vacation – at least for part of the day).
Anyhow, one of the things I love about traveling out to corporate in Palo Alto is I can just walk down the hall and find someone I need to talk with and have a chat with them. I can run into people in the cafeteria and get caught up there as well. There is a good bit of social interaction missing when you’re in the house with nothing but a couple of dogs all day.
Texai to the rescue! Some ingenious people over at Willow Garage developed a system to let you teleconference with people while on the move through an avatar of sorts. It’s hard to explain so make sure you go read all about the project and then watch the short video below. Now I just want to know how I can train one of these things to climb stairs and navigate around the pond at corporate. Who knows – maybe at the next VMUG you’ll see one of these things roaming around instead of me personally. I can just see the first VMworld where all of the vExperts are Texai robots.
One of the most talked about things in clouds these days is the ability to move data from one cloud to another cloud with little to no downtime. People have been doing this for a long time within a single datacenter using technologies such as VMware VMotion. Heck, I can remember first showing that off to people in 2003 and making their heads spin. Well, prepare for your head to spin again. The good people over at F5 have been hard at work and have an amazing demo of long distance VMotion (across the country to a different datacenter – live) up on the web. Watch the video below and then read on for some insights into what this means.
Pretty awesome, right? What’s interesting about this setup is that it doesn’t really require anything special on the storage side. Since they’re doing a storage VMotion over an extended distance that’s really the slow part. And if you remember from storage VMotion I can go from any storage to any storage while the VM is running. By using the unique technologies from F5 that allow for traffic redirection they’re able to move application stacks seamlessly between datacenters. The same thing could be done between clouds. What I like even more about this is that they do this by leveraging vCenter Orchestrator. That has become one of my favorite products here at VMware and it’s even included with vSphere for free. More on that product later in another post though.
Anyhow, I hope you enjoy this. For more information make sure to reach out to F5.
One of the coolest sites I’ve seen in a long time in the VMware Labs site. I’m really surprised how many people I meet don’t know this site exists. Think of Google labs and you’ll start to understand the type of things posted to this site – internal side projects that are just so cool we can’t keep them internal anymore.
There are several really great, free utilities on the site. One of my personal favorites is Onyx. Ever want to repeat something that you do in the vCenter Client over and over again with the Powershell CLI but don’t know how to write Powershell? Go ahead and install this utility in-band between the client and the vCenter server and then do some operations. Onyx will capture the network packets, inspect the API calls being made, and then translate it all into Powershell commands for you. Pretty awesome. I wish I had something like this for just about any tool I used on a regular basis.
The fun doesn’t stop there. For cell phone junkies there’s also a cell phone client to vCenter. It’s still a work in progress but already it’s proven pretty useful for getting into things in my lab. Of course now that I have my iPad I’m going to have to sit down and make a client for that device as well. I just need to find out where the extra 38 hours in the day went to get to it.
Well, I hope you find this site useful. It will be interesting to see what else our developers come up with to drop up on the site. I know I’ll be watching.
Allowing 3rd parties to write plug-ins for VMware vCenter was one of the best things I think we’ve ever done. One of the companies that’s taken advantage of this with some really cool and very useful tools is EMC. There are now 3 really great plug-ins for EMC users. I’ll link to the man himself (Chad Sakac) for full write-ups. Here’s a recap of the plug-ins below. All of these are free.
1) EMC Storage Viewer – This little gem allows some really great views all the way down into the array that’s underneath you hosts. Here’s a short video.
And here’s where you can grab it. Don’t forget the great whitepaper that goes along with it.
2) EMC Celera SRM Failback Tool – This one is awesome. If you’ve failed your environment over using VMware SRM then this tool will help you configure the storage to fail back to the original site. You can grab it here.
3) EMC Celera VDI Deployment – This will let you create a single VM on a share and then it will automatically clone that share out a bunch of times and automatically register the VMs in vCenter. Really nice way to scale out a bunch of VMs for VDI. It’s also available here.
Enjoy all of the new tools brought to you by our parent company, EMC.
I get stopped a lot at conferences and events and asked about storage layouts. I’m not sure why that is but there’s one common thread I’ve seen through all of these conversations – people really try and overcomplicate things. Usually someone is trying to over engineer a solution because that’s what you had to do in the physical world. Well, actually you didn’t need to do it in the physical world but for some reason every person I talk to thinks that their account has the biggest, meanest apps that require all of this complicated tuning in order to make run. Truth be told I’ve run into very few of those types of apps.
To make a long story short I ran across a post by Chad Sakac recently on dispelling some of the myths around VMFS. Stuff like number of VMs per volume, size of volume, and the biggest one – whether or not to use NFS. Chad goes into some great detail on all of these points and more. His most recent blog post is definitely worth a read. Actually his whole blog is worth a read but for this post I really want you to go and read the VMFS information to build your knowledgebase. I think you’ll find that keeping it simple and going with a lot of defaults makes things perform and scale well.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about SQL Server running in a VM and how disk writes were assured to happen in contradiction to a poorly written article on SQL Solutions. After working with VMware Engineering there’s now a KB article that talks about how and when I/O writes happen with different VMware products. Below is the full text of the KB article. You can also find the source here.
I’m sure whoever is reading my blog also reads Jason Boche’s blog. If not, then go subscribe now. Jason is a customer and writes a lot of great stuff from his point of view. He’s also very active in the VMware Communities. One of his recent posts was about how to get more VMs to VMotion at one time. This comes in really handy when you want to do maintenance on a host that’s running a ton of VMs. So click on to read all about how to increase the number of VMs that can migrate at a time.
Well, my last tip on putting your Mac to sleep faster was such a huge hit as you can see below that I thought I’d post another Mac tip up here. Don’t worry virtualization people, I’ll get back to that in a minute.
I stumbled across this tip when I hit the wrong key one day. If you’re typing along and you hit the “esc” key in the middle of a word then a list of possible words pops up. Use the arrow keys to get to the one you want and hit tab and the word completes. This works in any normally behaving Mac app. I say normally behaving because Microsoft Office doesn’t support this for some reason. Leave it to Redmond to screw that up.
What’s even neater is that it works with any word that it sees in the current document or page as well as dictionary words. This comes in real handy if you’re coding and need to complete some long entry. It also comes in handy for all the times you need to type in Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
OK. Not exactly related to virtualization but I thought I’d share this anyways. I am always on the move and I’m usually bringing my Mac with me. One of my favorite things about the Mac is that I can really just close the lid and walk to a meeting and open the lid and it’s ready to work instantly. That’s just incredible to me. Sure, a PC can sleep and even hibernate but neither makes the thing come alive quickly. The one painful thing for me has been waiting for my Mac to sleep. I run a lot of stuff all the time. Right now I have 21 different apps open plus a VM running in VMware Fusion. That means that when my Mac goes to sleep I have to wait for it to write most of the 4 GB of RAM to disk. A fellow engineer just showed me a faster way to make the Mac sleep – adjust the hibernatemode variable.
When I used to run datacenters every outage or blip or error was blamed on the firewall(s). Some DBA would call up and say their Oracle database is running slow and ask if we had made any changes to the firewall. Uh, no and you’re not even going through the firewall to get to the database. The firewall was that mysterious black box that everyone could blame because no one knew where it was or what went through it or what kind of control it had.
Enter virtualization – the new firewall. Coffee maker broken? It must be that virtualization we’re using. NIC doesn’t connect to the network? Gotta be that darn virtualization again. It’s always the virtualization layer’s fault. Maybe we need to do some better education with people about what the virtualization layer does and exactly how transparent it is. There are so many myths I see floating around the Internet blaming virtualization on this or that.
Well, if you’re ever in a bind one way to check if virtualization is the problem or not is to try things without virtualization in the middle. Carlo over at VMware Info posted a blog recently about how he quickly diagnosed a network problem just by booting the host with a LiveCD. No there’s some thinking! Finally someone gets it.
So if you’re ever in need of a quick sanity check a LiveCD may be just the thing you need. Now if we could just virtualize that and stick it into people’s heads then maybe they’ll stop blaming everything on the new firewall.
At VMworld this year during my Deploying VMware in a Linux Shop I demonstrated how to PXE boot VMware ESXi and automatically add it to Virtual Center. As promised a long time ago I’m finally documenting everything I did to get it to work. All of the work for this project was really done by an incredible engineer here at VMware named Lance Berc. I’m just putting some more step-by-step to it and making the process easier to find. Thanks, Lance for all of your work on this and the long night just before VMworld trying to troubleshoot issues!
At VMworld 2008 earlier this year I did a presentation on Deploying VMware in a Linux Shop. The first part of this presentation included a section on the guest OS and best practices. Our Linux team at VMware has now come up with a great whitepaper that includes all of these tips and best practices. You can find the paper on the tech resource site on vmware.com.
“Companies considering standardizing best practices for x86-based server virtualization should think about how they plan to incorporate desktop, application, storage and network virtualization in the future.”
That’s just one of the great tips from a new article on NetworkWorld. Usually I find articles like this and they have a few ok tips and then a lot that are off the wall. This one however was perfect the whole way through. I couldn’t have given better advice myself. If you are virtualized or thinking on going virtual then you need to take 10 minutes and go read this article now.
Rich Brambley over at VM /ETC posted an interesting blog entry today about restricting access to download the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client from the ESX web page. Not exactly sure how useful this will be to people or not but I always like to pass along interesting or useful posts. Read the full article over on VM /ETC.
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Disclaimer
I work for VMware as a Principal Systems Engineer. The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by VMware and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of VMware. This is my blog - not a VMware blog.
Title:Presentation Zen
Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery Author: Garr Reynolds ISBN 10: 0-321-52565-5
This is my second read about creating great presentations. I love this book because it has sample after sample of really nice presentations and describes why they are great. For more good reads visit the Good Reads page.
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